Learning to speak twenty languages may sound impossible to you, but I assure you that it is not. Consider a man by the name of Ziad Fazah. He owns the record for the world's most accomplished living polyglot. Fazah is able to speak 58 different languages. Two men stand out as the most accomplished polyglots in history. Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, a Vatican librarian of the 19th century, spoke over 50 languages fluently and spoke with a high level of proficiency in 114 others. Sir John Bowring, the British governor of Hong Kong from 1854 to 1859, was able to speak about 100 languages fluently and almost 100 others with a high degree of proficiency.
As far as my language learning goes, I am presently using the Rosetta Stone program (which I highly recommend) to learn Spanish. I also start classes at the Berlitz Language School in Portland in a couple of weeks. There I plan to take two languages. I am still deciding what those languages will be. They will be made up of some combination of French/Arabic/Italian. So I am beginning training in three languages. I am most likely starting at Portland State University in the fall (with a major in linguistics.) I plan evenually to use this desired language knowledge to help people in need (more details on that later). So there is my first little intro for you. I will have more tidbits later. Thanks for reading. I hope you visit again and follow my Mt. Everest of a journey. -Andrew J. (a.k.a. "ajpolyglot")
2 comments:
Welcome to linguistic blogging. It's early days, and the important thing is to keep going. I have enjoyed the posts so far, so blog early, blog often!
Just ran across something that may assist you in getting started with a few more languages:
BBC Free Online Language courses
I haven't yet explored this myself - I read about it on somebody else's blog, and immediately came here to tell you about it. I'll be exploring it myself here momentarily. :D Looks promising.
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